American writer Jason Pargin believes people don’t like eating lobster; instead, they do so because it’s considered a high-class food.
Sharing his views about the sea animal in a now-viral TikTok video, Pargin said he believes in the conspiracy theory that says people only eat lobster because they think it’s an ‘elite’ food item.
“There’s a really common joke that goes wow the first person to ever eat a lobster must have been really hungry,” Jason said in his video.
“I mean look at it,” he continued as the clip showed a big lobster in the background.
“It’s a giant disgusting sea insect and I have always hated that joke because we actually do know the history of why people started eating these and it’s really interesting and it ties into a conspiracy theory I believe in which is that I don’t think anyone actually enjoys eating lobster. I think they’ve just been convinced that it’s a high-class food for a really specific reason,” he explained.
“As recently as the 1800s, lobster was considered a trash food for poor people in the United States at least, they used to grind them up and used them as fertilizer and they used to feed them to prisoners.” He said, “Dock workers once went on strike because they were being fed lobster three times a week and that was too much. And the reason was in that place at that time, lobster was really plentiful.”
He said a lobster is a baseline food that is always available for people to eat if they run out of everything else to eat.
“So because it was difficult to mess with and because it had to be shipped live inside the country, away from the coast, it became known that lobster was difficult to obtain,” Pargin went on. “And because it’s difficult to obtain, it had to be expensive, and because it was expensive, we decided it was good.”
“You were eating lobster not because you enjoyed it but because you wanted it to be known to all who were watching you that you could afford lobster.”
He further said people eat lobster not because they enjoy it but because they have this urge to prove to others that they can afford this luxury food item.
Jason’s clip received over 558K views on TikTok with more than 40K likes and 4400 comments.
And people in the comment section were divided in their opinions – while some took offense by Pargin’s theory, others agreed with him.
“What are you talking about? Lobster is amazing,” one person commented.
“Bro obviously never ate lobster before,” a second added.
“It tastes like, all right, basically tastes like nothing,” a third said.“I enjoy lobster and I am not even American,” a fourth wrote
Meanwhile, people on Twitter also have a lot of things to say in response to Jason’s controversial video.
Do you like eating lobster? What are your views on Jason’s theory? Let us know in the comments.
Source: TikTok